Cecile Richards certainly wasn’t in the White House anymore. Instead, she was pulling into Bedminster, Donald Trump’s club in New Jersey, on a cold Sunday morning, trying to find a way in to stem the damage.
The country had become almost unrecognizable to her in the days and weeks since Trump’s victory. The feminist-led future that Richards and so many of her allies had thought was coming had vanished with the election results. No one had planned for this. There was no political response plan. No psychological preparation for Clinton’s supporters. They were all plunged into a new reality. Now, Richards’s top priority was to protect Planned Parenthood in this new world. Defunding Planned Parenthood, she believed, would be the “number one goal” of the new administration.
She knew her organization had support: donations and volunteers flooded their offices as women poured into the streets to protest Trump. Another hope, a friend in the fashion world had suggested, might be the rare people the president seemed to listen to—his daughter and son-in-law. The idea that the president’s daughter and her husband would be negotiating over matters of national policy felt ridiculous to Richards, another politician’s daughter. But, Richards realized, the threat to reproductive health care was enormous with the new administration. “I never want to turn down any opportunity to make our case,” she said. She begged her husband, Kirk Adams, to join her as a witness to whatever might follow.
At the clubhouse, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner ordered breakfast. Richards couldn’t stomach a meal; she could barely handle the meeting. Ivanka, a self-proclaimed feminist running a clothing brand built on hashtags like #womenwhowork, started by wanting to talk about her feelings. Her father, she said, was the only Republican during the campaign to say anything nice about Planned Parenthood, a message she personally pushed him to deliver from a primary debate stage. Why had Richards not complimented him in return?
Nursing a coffee on that bleak winter day, Richards couldn’t believe she had to explain why Planned Parenthood wasn’t excited to support a new president who had pledged to overturn Roe and wanted to defund her organization out of existence. “I did acknowledge those statements,” Richards replied. “But he also said he was going to defund Planned Parenthood, so that’s not going to be much help.”
“Well, you have to understand, my father is pro-life,” Ivanka responded.
Leaning across the table, Kushner explained to Richards what he saw as her big mistake—becoming “political.” He proposed a simple solution: split Planned Parenthood in two, with a smaller arm for abortions and a larger one for women’s health services. The ideal outcome would be a headline that read PLANNED PARENTHOOD DISCONTINUES ABORTION SERVICES. If that could happen, Kushner promised more federal funding for its health services.
Done, Kushner and Ivanka seemed to believe, Richards later recounted. Decades of abortion drama solved. The couple apparently thought they had unlocked an easy compromise on an issue that had ensnared American politicians for more than four decades. Richards saw something else: a political bribe that traded abortion for federal funds. It wasn’t even a particularly politically astute one. There was no way that House Republicans, who had spent years casting Planned Parenthood as a moral stain on the nation, would agree to Kushner’s plan.
Top policy staff inside the White House who opposed abortion were dumbfounded when they heard from Ivanka about the plan. It seemed to them like she was on another planet, one where she didn’t see how deeply the antiabortion movement had embedded their forces in the new government. The man who had led the charge against Planned Parenthood for nearly a decade wasn’t just in the administration; he was now vice president.
In Bedminster, Richards plastered a smile on her face. Planned Parenthood could hardly undermine its central message—that services like abortion were fundamental to women’s health—for an administration that represented everything they opposed.
“We really stand for the right of women to get the reproductive health care they need,” Richards explained. “And we’re not gonna trade that off for money.” As they stood up to leave, Kushner offered another warning. The new administration planned to repeal Obama’s health care law within weeks. If Richards wanted the deal, she’d better move fast.
As their car pulled out of the empty golf course, Richards told her husband that the whole experience—the golf club meeting, their proposal, even the headlines about Trump attacking judges blaring from the televisions above the bar—felt surreal. Obviously, no such “deal” was going to happen. But it sure seemed to Richards like the president’s daughter, a New York socialite whose most recent job was running a fashion brand sold at Macy’s, would be overseeing women’s health for the nation. Ivanka and Jared were, thought Richards, “out of touch but obviously incredibly emboldened and feeling empowered.” It was hard to wrap her mind around. Richards and her husband were quiet the rest of the way back into New York City.
Her dream of a Clinton administration that would not only defend but expand abortion rights had died. Yet it was hard for broad swaths of liberal America to see how quickly the politics of abortion had changed amid the chaos that overtook the country in those early months of the new administration. During the campaign, Trump had said—multiple times—that he planned to pick judges who would overturn Roe. He repeated that pledge after he was elected. But the nation didn’t believe what it heard.
Many voters assumed that Trump’s opposition to abortion rights was just part of the political game to win the White House. The new president was a celebrity, and America believed they knew his history. A Manhattan businessman who didn’t know how to pronounce the books of the New Testament seemed unlikely to be the guy who eradicated abortion rights.
Even some voters who backed Trump didn’t believe his administration posed a threat to abortion. “Participants tend to think Trump’s position is malleable and he is not likely to prioritize abortion,” wrote the National Institute for Reproductive Health in a report summarizing its findings from focus groups conducted in Ohio and North Carolina. Participants believe that he is “all rhetoric,” the report said, and his inflammatory language was just to “shock people.”
Another set of focus groups commissioned by Planned Parenthood found similar results. Voters who backed Trump said they would be frustrated and angry if he defunded the organization. “It’s a deal-breaker,” said a fifty-eight-year-old woman in Phoenix. “It will rob women of basic fundamental rights. I’m talking about female health care, which includes abortion. Which includes birth control. I think birth control is the greatest gift that they gave for womankind.” If Trump attacked Planned Parenthood, added another woman, “I’d be pissed off as hell.”
There was also little preparation for what was to come at the court. Nancy Northup, the head of the Center for Reproductive Rights, had felt so certain walking into Hillary Clinton’s Election Night party with her husband at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York, ready to make history under that literal glass ceiling. Everyone was there. Little girls in sparkly shoes. Hipster moms in velvet pantsuits over THE FUTURE IS FEMALE T-shirts. Katy Perry, the pop star pumping out feminist anthems like “Roar.” Chuck Schumer, who would soon be the Democratic Senate leader. Stephanie Schriock, the head of EMILYs List. Ilyse Hogue, the head of NARAL. And Richards.
Northup left around 9:30 p.m. when the results started to look a little weird and the night started to seem like a long one. When she walked in the door at home, her son told her it wasn’t looking good. By 2:00 a.m., she was calling her sister, sobbing. Clinton’s presidential campaign symbolized the dream of everything Northup had worked for her entire adult life, all the way back to college when she fought for the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment.
On the subway into the office later that morning, Hillary Schneller, a senior lawyer at the Center for Reproductive Rights, frantically sent Leonard Leo’s list of potential justices to Julie Rikelman, the head of litigation, with a note saying they’d better start digging into their records. The all-staff meeting that day was like a shiva—the grief, the quiet sobbing, and the sad platter of bagels—pausing to watch Clinton make her concession speech on all three televisions. All Northup could offer her team was a pep talk that sounded like a dirge. “We are built for this,” she told her staff. Look at our wins in Bogotá, Colombia, and Nepal, she told them, citing places where the center had made strides to unwind total abortion bans. Protecting abortion rights at home during a Trump presidency would be hard, but not impossible, she said. As she spoke, one of her lawyers walked into the office with tears streaming down her face.
Now, a few months later, the center was waging that fight. But for many of its Democratic allies, the stakes—even at the court—weren’t fully clear. Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation had been an even swap: Antonin Scalia for another conservative. This was still the court that had struck down the Texas law. Even in some surprising places, the belief that the Supreme Court would save abortion continued. In Texas, NARAL dismissed the Republican trigger ban bill with a striking sense of confidence. “This constitutional amendment is a pretty unserious idea,” said Blake Rocap, NARAL Texas’s legislative counsel. “It would basically have no effect because, guess what? The Supreme Court already said you can’t make abortion illegal.”
For Planned Parenthood, the court was a second-order problem. The risk it faced in this new administration was immediate. Republicans had been trying to defund the organization for years, and the David Daleiden videos were still fresh. If they succeeded, it would result in hundreds of thousands of low-income women losing access to care and the likely closure of clinics across the country. In April, the administration undid an Obama administration rule preventing states from blocking funding for family-planning clinics that also provided abortions—essentially taking money away from Planned Parenthood. In Iowa alone, that move later resulted in the closure of four clinics, after the state’s Republican governor approved a budget that removed Planned Parenthood’s Medicaid funding.
Now, it seemed like Republicans would have the votes in Congress to go further than ever before. As Richards expected, the new administration quickly released another iteration of the efforts to repeal Obama’s health care law and defund Planned Parenthood. This version would cut federal funding for one year, eliminating $550 million in Medicaid dollars, a temporary step that could open the door to more sustained cuts in the future. This was an “existential crisis,” she said. With Trump in office, there was no longer a presidential veto to protect them, Richards knew. Saving their federal funding—not the more distant threat to Roe—had to be their top priority in this new era. Their best hope rested on whether they could channel all the frustration and energy of the Women’s March into this new fight, she believed.
Richards used the new surge of donations to fund an advertising campaign and organize supporters to push back, dispatching them to flood Capitol Hill and question their representatives at raucous town hall meetings. When Pence posted a photo of negotiations over the bill in the White House, showing the vice president sitting at a long conference table surrounded by twenty-five white men, Planned Parenthood deployed its “pink army” to launch online attacks. Even Anna Wintour, Vogue’s editor in chief, wore a hot-pink Planned Parenthood button—magnetic, to avoid puncturing her clothes—as she watched the shows at New York Fashion Week.
Still, the legislation passed the House and seemed headed for success in the Senate. After rallying her troops in a protest on Capitol Hill, Richards returned to her hotel room to anxiously watch the live stream of the Senate vote. Then the unthinkable happened. John McCain bucked his party’s leadership, voting against the legislation with a dramatic thumbs-down. Republicans didn’t have the votes. The bill was officially dead. To Richards, it was another sign that their protesting and organizing succeeded. “I know Ann is laughing her ass off,” Richards’s husband texted her. “This day belongs to you and your folks. Here’s to having many more like it.”
In some ways, the failure of the defund legislation had less to do with Planned Parenthood and more with the popularity of the health care bill. Americans had grown accustomed to the benefits of the law, provisions like free contraception, allowing young adults to remain on their parents’ health care plans, and mandatory coverage for preexisting conditions. By linking Planned Parenthood to that law, Republicans had unwittingly managed to protect the organization.
That fall, there was a second victory when Senate Republicans dropped plans to repeal the health care bill entirely, effectively admitting defeat by switching their focus to Trump’s tax plans. And then, a third when Trump pressured Tom Price, the head of Health and Human Services and a longtime opponent of Planned Parenthood, to resign after reports that he spent $400,000 flying on private jets.
Richards had started talking to her board about stepping down before the 2016 election, but she stayed to steer the organization through the threats of the first year of the Trump administration. After nearly a dozen years, she had accomplished her mission of transforming Planned Parenthood into a political powerhouse. It wasn’t just the lobbying efforts and flood of donations for Democratic campaigns. The protests that she helped organize in Texas with Davis created a new generation of abortion-rights activists, some of whom eventually came to work at Planned Parenthood. And now, after Clinton’s defeat, there were millions of women who were “pissed off and ready for action,” she said, and that power wouldn’t get undone, no matter what the Trump administration did. “I knew that our work was far from over, but the tally was Women—3, Trumpcare—0,” Richards later recounted. “The lasting legacy of this moment will be the generations of women it has inspired and energized.” On her last day, supporters gave her a social media salute, firing off a flood of tweets with the hashtag #ThankYouCecile. Hopefully, Richards thought, their collective power could save abortion rights—and the Democratic Party—from Trump.